Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Non-Consensual Personalization

amitp.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 239 posts

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#151

Post by leppr »

bagels wrote: post #91

Who even has time to play with settings of every application or website? I understand that some people may want it, but I sure cannot relate to caring one bit what color my buttons are.

You don't care because apps these days have mostly sensible defaults (when it comes to visual design at least), and most often both light and dark themes.

If the YouTube or Twitter UI was bright yellow backgrounds with comic sans MS font, you might find it distracting and wish for a customization option.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#152

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

withinboredom wrote: post #138
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Importantly, to get the data to learn from it to improve faster than their competitors can.

We realized our competitors were copying us at a company long ago. We geofenced a/b tests so they wouldn’t see what we were testing and intentionally made the web app worse for that area (mostly as a “fun” 20% type project). Interestingly, the “worse” version starting doing really well even though we were giving them “control” for all older features. We ended up rolling back several months of changes to the entire pr…

That's why you should measure many things - especially all your important things - in every a/b test [=

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#153

Post by pferde »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #148
Swenrekcah wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few months ago I had a discussion here with someone regarding good/bad design, what was personal preference and what could be considered objective judgment. They mentioned something about a design philosophy in which there should never be more than one button, or if there were two then one should be the main button that people really should click on. It seems there is an effort to raise a whole school of new design…

I think there's a middle ground. Providing clear options and deliberate choices can be done through not having a thousand options and buttons. Wikipedia is a clear example of not taking this into consideration. There's a hundred links mixed with the text, and buttons and doodads everywhere around it, which makes it very clear to actually think about what you want to do. If you compare Encarta '96 with Wikipedia: http…

All I see on the Marginalia Plato article is a site that forces an uncomfortably narrow article width on me, while eschewing almost all the advantages of hypertext in the name of some ill-conceived notion of "quieter reading".

I'm not saying it's all bad, though - it's something that could be an option offered to the unfortunate people with attention deficit disorder.

The forced text width, however, is inexcusable.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#154

Post by withinboredom »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #152
withinboredom wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We realized our competitors were copying us at a company long ago. We geofenced a/b tests so they wouldn’t see what we were testing and intentionally made the web app worse for that area (mostly as a “fun” 20% type project). Interestingly, the “worse” version starting doing really well even though we were giving them “control” for all older features. We ended up rolling back several months of changes to the entire pr…

That's why you should measure many things - especially all your important things - in every a/b test [=

With the Simpson paradox, even if your metrics go up, across all your segments, it’s actually going down. Measuring only takes you so far.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#155

Post by marginalia_nu »

pferde wrote: post #153
marginalia_nu wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a middle ground. Providing clear options and deliberate choices can be done through not having a thousand options and buttons. Wikipedia is a clear example of not taking this into consideration. There's a hundred links mixed with the text, and buttons and doodads everywhere around it, which makes it very clear to actually think about what you want to do. If you compare Encarta '96 with Wikipedia: http…

All I see on the Marginalia Plato article is a site that forces an uncomfortably narrow article width on me, while eschewing almost all the advantages of hypertext in the name of some ill-conceived notion of "quieter reading". I'm not saying it's all bad, though - it's something that could be an option offered to the unfortunate people with attention deficit disorder. The forced text width, however, is inexcusable.

Yeah I think that's probably from my own habit of never using full screen windows. Though I'm not sure how to deal with the fact that it's very hard to read long lines of text. Most printed books, newspapers, and so forth use that width (max 60ch) specifically because it's hard to follow lines longer than that. I chose to follow book guidelines specifically because that format has been largely stable for some thousand years and is at this point the gold standard for legibility. Usually when things stagnate for that long, it's not because nobody has thought to try something different in all that time.

Maybe multiple columns could be an option, I guess. Not sure how to do that well with varying paragraph sizes, though.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#156

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

axiomsEnd wrote: post #142
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine if cars came in a kit and I could assemble it and choose the fittings myself ... man, that'd be great. I mean, for a niche certain audience, yes it is great. But for mass market, people don't necessarily want to take on a whole new hobby in order to experience the thing. Worse, it's contextual within the same individual: the person who wants to customise the car doesn't want to make their own sourdough pizz…

Instant messaging in 200x was based on "naked content" that could be parsed by anyone, so there was a lot of different programs supporting various forms of communications. If you weren't a programmer you simply relied on 3rd-party software and that worked quite nicely.

Exactly. likewise most people go to a dealer and get a "third party car" that works quite nicely on the shared infrastructure of roads, signs, gas stations etc. Maybe with a few configurable options such as color.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#157

Post by jdrc »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #130

I think in general there is this trend in UX toward treating users as helpless children, and it's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you take away someone's agency, then yes absolutely they will be helpless. They will learn to be helpless, to act like children. I don't think that's something we want to aim for in general. It's bad for society and disastrous for democracy. Maybe it's from looking too much at the…

Children are the best target demographic for marketers. Considering the demographic decline and the diminishing numbers of children, the next best solution is to infantilize adults.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#158

Post by MandieD »

Related: over-internationalization. Just because I’m browsing from an IP address that appears to be in Germany, doesn’t mean that I want your site autotranslated into German with no way to switch back, even when I type “/en” or take other active measures to indicate that no, I really do want to read it in the original English.

I also don’t want to be protected from seeing English-language content you’ve not yet translated to German by being popped over to the German homepage when I clicked a link to an article that’s only in English.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#159

Post by wccrawford »

iqanq wrote: post #109
markstos wrote: post #35

Example: Google Calendar personalizes an event mentioning dinner with my wife with an illustration of a steak dinner. We're vegetarian.

Wow, that is vile.

Doubly so, because it influences how even non-vegans think about that dinner now. If you hadn't thought about what that dinner would be, you'd now be thinking about steak. You might otherwise have picked a lot of other things. I think it's unethical for them to manipulate you that way, even unintentionally.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#160

Post by morsch »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #155
pferde wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All I see on the Marginalia Plato article is a site that forces an uncomfortably narrow article width on me, while eschewing almost all the advantages of hypertext in the name of some ill-conceived notion of "quieter reading". I'm not saying it's all bad, though - it's something that could be an option offered to the unfortunate people with attention deficit disorder. The forced text width, however, is inexcusable.

Yeah I think that's probably from my own habit of never using full screen windows. Though I'm not sure how to deal with the fact that it's very hard to read long lines of text. Most printed books, newspapers, and so forth use that width (max 60ch) specifically because it's hard to follow lines longer than that. I chose to follow book guidelines specifically because that format has been largely stable for some thousan…

On Firefox mobile, it's more like 11 characters wide. Pretty much unusable.
Post reply on HN